Far red (740nm) might be very beneficial to tomato production. Studies have shown that it can help produce longer “hypocotyl” (the seedling shoot that becomes the stem) by just blasting the plant with 12 minutes of light at the end of the day (16hr photoperiod with T5 lights). Other studies claim that far red can help reduce or eliminate sucker growth.

Stairs are pretty boring, but they don’t have to be. I convinced my loving wife that she needed stair lights. I put the project off for over 6 months while I’ve been greenhousing, but now that that project is more completed, I have time to get back to house projects. Let’s get building.

Building

First, we will use the APA102 lights. These are individually controllable. They are the same lights we’ve used in our ambilight project with the minnowboard max.

To install the LED strips on the stairs, I picked up several aluminum channels from superbrightleds.com and the corresponding “frosted” covers. To stick the channels on the stairs, I used 3M automotive double-sided tape. The aluminum can be drilled and screws can be used to mount, but I didn’t do that. I used a simple dremel to cut the channels where I needed to.

I’m hiding the photon and the power supply in the closet which is adjacent to the stairs. I cut a small hole in the wall on the closet side and put a 4 wire, 14AWG cable through the wall. This is low-voltage (5V), so you don’t need an electrician or a expensive permit to install inside the wall… at least in my area. On the other side, I combined a 2 socket “keystone” faceplate with a couple two wire speaker jacks. This doesn’t look half bad.

Effects

Using the same python library as the minnowboard max ambilight project, and adding a “driver” that can speak our “LightProtocol” that we’ve installed on the particle photon, we are able to to complex effects and themes on the desktop and change the lights over wifi.

I have three effects coded up: “Chase”, “Random Rainbow Transforms”, and “Rainbow”. Check out the video for how these effects look on our lights. What other cool effects can we do?